Cell culture or organ culture systems have been used to evaluate the physiological toxicity or physiological activity of various chemical substances or biologically derived substances. Further, cell culture or organ culture systems have been considered effective for evaluating physiological action or damage of physical stimulations such as temperature, radiation, electrical field or magnetic field to the body.
Organ culture systems have significant advantages over cell culture systems. These advantages include that the relationship between various tissue components and various cells is maintained in a manner similar to that of the body, and therefore organ culture systems are a more meaningful physiological test method. However, organ culture systems have many disadvantages, such as difficulty to supply problems associated with large amounts of living organs, difficulty in duplicating organ function, difficulty in quantifying the effect of the drug due to heterogeneity of the cells or variation of the size of the tissue, difficulty in defining the effect only on the target cells because the system is made of numerous cells, and difficulty associated with culturing the organ systems for a long period of time. Thus, currently organ culture systems are not at a stage which can be used practically as a general cytotoxicity test method.
On the other hand, the following various kinds of culture systems have been practiced as the cytotoxicity test method using cell culture system.